Our apartment was conveniently located in the middle of Lisbon city centre, and Belém, home to the very impressive Belém tower. As we had big evening plans, we decided to use our daytime hours to wander on down and explore all that this area had to offer. Before I get into the juice, I’d like to take a moment to call out ASOS and their incredibly uncomfortable espadrilles. They are single-handedly the worst shoes I’ve ever owned and left my feet K I L L I N G me for the rest of the trip. Bastards.

So yeah, we walked into Belém… Maybe we should’ve got the train, but the walk was about 40 minutes along the river. Pretty sweet views kept us occupied, and even though it was kinda cloudy, we kept stopping to take photographs.

As you can see, the sky was pretty moody, but when you have a bridge that impressive it doesn’t dampen the desire for a pic. We kept walking, kept taking photos… And then stopped for a rest in one of these weird little circle art installation(?)/ seat things. Here you can see the shitty shoes that felt like walking on glass. Cool picture though right?

About 2/3rds of the way to Belém tower we came across this giant monument, the Monument of The Discoveries. It’s a big old boy, with loads of people sculpted into the sides. You can actually go up it too, which perhaps we’d have done if the queues weren’t so long. I’d have got more pictures of it, but I didn’t realise until afterwards that I’d been recording it for seconds at a time rather than snapping it. LIFE.

Another little walk and we got to the tower. A very old 16th century defence tower. It’s beautiful, and when we arrived the tide was pretty damn in, so it was submerged in the water, really adding to the impressiveness. I think the pictures do the talking here…

And one more without myself actually in the photo..

Again, we didn’t go in, because we didn’t have unlimited time- the night was calling and so was NOS Alive festival.. So, we walked back, stopping off for a coke along the water. The walk felt just as long on the way back, and we knew we had to do it all over again later. Pretty rough.

That was all for our quick trip to Belém, and sort of set a tone for this holiday… Cramming as much as possible into as little time as we had. But this worked well and I didn’t come away from Lisbon feeling like I had heaps more that I missed out on.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Stay tuned for plenty more Portugal chat, my favourite day is still to come, and I can sense a beaut post coming on that day!

P.S. My friend Dan Waggon took some of the photos of me in this post, but he recently stole a bunch of my photos for a blog post and didn’t credit me, so….